I was at the local University gym yesterday, and I saw a graduate student wearing a T-shirt that said something striking:
“Always be yourself-
Unless you can be Batman-
Then always be Batman.”
This reminded me of one of my favorite aphorisms of my Teacher, Sri Chinmoy, from the twenty-eighth volume of Seventy-Seven Thousand Service Trees (poem #27834):
“Be infinitely more than just yourself.”
Many years ago I was sitting in the lobby of this same gym, rehearsing poems from Sri Chinmoy’s immortal collection The Golden Boat. I was repeating them silently, although my lips were moving. A young Asian woman, as she was passing by, smiled and waved at me. I had never met her. I then realised that she wasn’t waving at me, she was responding to Guru’s vibration and was greeting him. I was just the medium. I was happy that I was successful in manifesting Guru on that vibrational level. Similarly, I remember after I recited the one thousand poems of The Wings of Light in 2021, how I became a different person for twenty-four hours afterwards. I was already back in Chicago and people would stop in the street and just look at me. I don’t think I had grown horns. They felt something of Sri Chinmoy in my aura, and that’s why they would stop and smile.
I wrote in February about the experience that preceded my foot fracture. The night before I broke my foot, I had to do some late night shopping at the local convenience store. The cashier was bored and rude. I was dismissive and curt in return. We were irritated with each other, and I left the store in a bad consciousness.
The next day, I slipped on the ice and broke my foot. I felt that my fracture was at least partly a result of my bad interaction with the cashier the night before. It was a vibrational consequence.
Today I had to go back to this same pharmacy to get a prescription filled. This time the lady at the window was every bit as callous, desultory and incompetent as the cashier had been. She told me my prescription would take only twenty minutes to fill. I came back in an hour and she said, “Give us ten more minutes!”
When I attempted to ask her a question about my order, she yelled at me for not staying in line.
I did not argue, but I indicated through my intonation, and some diplomatic language, that I thought she was terrible at a public-facing job. I was right.
I left the store in a bad mood.
Then I realised I had made a serious mistake.
“Oh no,” I thought to myself, “What am I going to break now?”
So, I stood outside the store, just two feet in front of the double automatic doors, by the bike racks, and I very quietly recited from memory the whole program of Guru’s spiritual poems that I delivered over the August Celebrations. I took me twelve minutes to say the whole thing most soulfully. I felt I needed to say these words someplace within the vicinity of the store. I had to heal that vibration, and keep the anger and irritation from spreading and affecting other people or causing some misfortune in my life. I had to heal it and fix it.
Finally, I got on my bike in a much better consciousness.
I feel that the public recitation of Guru’s words is a way of planting a seed of higher consciousness in these places.
Be infinitely more than yourself. Be your highest, purest, kindest, and greatest Self. Even Batman will admire you.
I will be kind to someone tomorrow!